I could have saved this one for the weekly topic, but I’m counting on getting something better before then, plus this is just too odd a story not to post immediately.
So, let me paint this picture. Walkabout Studios is a basement office half below grade, meaning my windows look out right at ground level and the outside door is sunk down a few steps. Right outside this door is a small wastebasket, used for the smellier things like the rags soaked in alcohol, UV resin, or acetone from the various projects that I get up to – don’t need those fumes in the studio, I’m weird enough already. Actually, I have a camera, I don’t need to paint a picture:
For reasons yet to be determined, this wastebasket collects a few too many specimens within it, such as the purseweb spider that I featured a month ago, as well as another of the same species a couple weeks later (not discovered until it had passed,) and an odd beetle late last night. I’d put this down to intoxicating fumes from the rags therein, except that they’re far from fresh and the fumes have to be almost nonexistent. I’m now going to have to check daily, it seems, because today I glanced in there and found this:
That, yes, is a crayfish, one that I’m not trying any further identification attempts on because there are 56 different species in North Carolina and it’s not worth the effort. Now, this isn’t too astounding, because the pond is a few dozen meters away. and crayfish (at least some species) do go wandering from their water source from time to time, something that I thought I had a post illustrating but cannot locate, and they can also climb moderately well. Still, why here, and why is this trash can so damn inviting?
[It’s possible that it’s not inviting at all, merely impossible to escape from, so it routinely samples what goes on in the yard perpetually.]
But yes, I did a photo session.
If you know your crayfish species, sing out; I have to say that the coloration and surprisingly small chelicerae (pincers) are not things that I recall seeing before, so it’s potentially a new species for me. Size-wise, however, it was what I expected.
It’s all clean and shiny for these because I gave it a good soak in water from the rain barrel before this session, since I’m a guy. Technically, I could sort these photos into the Arthropods folders, since the crustaceans are part of that Phylum, but I use the Aquatic folder instead – inconsistent or incorrect, perhaps, but I’m the only one that has to find the images, plus I have seven Arthropods folders (limited to about 4,000 images each) and one Aquatic, so…
Prompted by this knowledge (about the Phylum, I mean,) I did a quick check in BugGuide,net, which does indeed have a collection of crayfish photos. None of them are identified in any way though, so no help there. But check out this find – I’m jealous.
Of course I went for the portrait angle, and of course my model here was released back into the pond immediately afterward – perhaps not where it really intended to be, since it had been going walkabout when it got trapped, but it had been out of the water for an unknown period of time and I felt it was best.
So, yeah, we’ll see if this is the oddest thing to show up in the trash can this year…